Olivia (80 page)

Amy nuzzled at his chest and cast Olivia a warning glance.

Softly, Kurlun said, “You fear you will not like the man your Vorgullum chooses for you, but I’m certain he would take your preference into consideration.  You must know you have your pick of good, strong hunters.”

When she did not move or speak, Kurlun gently disengaged from Amy and came to put his hands on Olivia’s shoulders.  “And you, Olivia, you will be cared for no matter where you live—in Vorgullum’s lair, or that of his replacement, or your own in the women’s tunnels.  You give us much; you will always be provided for.”

And because she couldn’t ask what her heart ached to ask, she cried, “Why doesn’t he ever
tell
me these things?”

Kurlun chuckled.  “Because he is a leader, and as my own father used to tell me, being a leader is all about stalling for time while you grow some guts.  I suppose he thinks he’ll cause you less pain if he has only a little time to tell you before he flees into the night.”  He offered her a lop-sided smile.  “Of course, I call that being a stag-headed fool, but then, I’m not leader, am I?”

Olivia giggled a little, made herself hold onto her smile.

Kurlun looked from her, back to Amy, and then released her and said, too heartily, “This gulla is as clean as he is going to get, I think.  Time to take myself back to the hunt.  Amy, my little mink, I will keep you with me until we meet again.”  He bound on a loincloth, chucked Smugg under the chin, and strode from the baths.

Amy looked at Olivia for a long time as steam rose from the water.  “You’ll live, you know,” she said at last.

Olivia sat down beside her.  “How can this
not
bother you?”

Amy sighed, dropped her hand to her lap and massaged at her belly restlessly, cutting an eerie parallel to Carla.  The only difference was the baby nursing contentedly at her breast.  “So, in comes Kurlun one night,” she said, just as if she were continuing a conversation and not beginning one.  Her tone was light; her face, difficult to read.  “And he sat me down and told me that Vorgullum is getting ready for Round Two of the Rape of the Sabine Women, and he’s been invited along to carry one.  Then he looks me in the eye with that same look you’ve got on right now and tells me I’ll need a mate while he’s away.  ‘A female
might
be permitted to await her mate’s return,’ he says, ‘but a female with a baby
must
be cared for.’  And while I’m being cared for, I’m expected to be as enthusiastic, or at least as willing, as I am for my Kurlun.”

“What did you say?”

“Nothing.  I was getting ready to ask him just what the hell was the point of getting all these humans if they’re going to play musical mates every time they leave overnight when he dropped that bomb about ‘no young can come of it.’  Well, I snuck in a couple questions and found out he thought I was going to be barren for about six years!  So I shut up, and he must have thought I was considering the issue because he started recommending this male or that male to look after me while he was gone. 

“We settled on Damark.  He’s even older than Kurlun, if you can dig that, but he’s got the use of both wings and he’s been bred before, so he’s no small shakes at changing wrappings or walking them in the middle of the night.  Kurlun brought him down to meet me face to face, kind of get to know each other, you know.  He seems like a nice guy.  He told me I wouldn’t have to couple with him until I was ready, and didn’t suppose I’d be ready for some time on account of I just had a damn baby, but the expectation is still there.  And while it is allegedly my right to refuse any male, if I
do
refuse, I go straight to the women’s tunnels.  Do not pass Go.  Do not collect two hundred dollars.”

Now Amy began to look grim.  “I don’t know just how much you know about this, so I’m going to assume you know nothing at all and just say it:  Life in the women’s tunnels sucks on toast.  You don’t have your own room unless you are someone as important as Murgull or Olivia.  Instead, you get one cramped-ass little cave with one pit which you share with two to five other people.  At the crack of dawn, whoever’s on guard duty comes in and wakes everybody up so they can start lighting candles and hanging lamps.  Then you haul fuel logs out and start up the kitchen fires.  Then you take your tired ass up top and start gathering food, or you stay in the kitchen and start cooking it. You make bread, you harvest the daily fungi, you thaw out the night’s portion of meat, and you do it all damn day.  And if there is a hunt, God help you, because you have to butcher it, cook for the hunters, preserve what’s left, tan the hide, draw the cord, render the fat, and cure the bones.  And who’s taking care of Smugg during all this?  Why, you are!  Not that the gullan wouldn’t cheerfully trip all over themselves to play with a baby, but they haven’t invented bottles down here yet, so there’s the score.  Honey, I don’t care who I have to sleep with, I’m not doing all that!”

“What did you plan to do if you got pregnant?”

“Well, obviously, I knew about the potion.  Not the one Carla keeps having to take, the other one.  Horumn knows about it; I’m a little surprised Murgull didn’t.”

“There was a lot we never got around to,” Olivia said bleakly.

“Well…You brew a certain tea and drink it for three nights, then you take the potion, you wait a while, you throw up everything but your toenails for an hour or two, and then you’re good for about a month.  I’ve been talking to the other ladies; we’re all in agreement.  Had to smack some of them around a little, though,” she added, looking dark.  “Sarah B. was just furious, and you know she doesn’t like Burgelbun all that much to begin with.  Karen’s been shacking up with the village eunuch, so no trouble there.  Mudmar’s not even going, so that’s not an issue for Ellen.  Tobi and Tina are taking care of themselves and nobody’s gonna get near Cheyenne.  Nobody’s really happy about the situation, but what choice do we have?”

“Here’s a novel thought, why don’t we just tell them we’re not going to be barren?”

Amy leaned back slightly and raised one eyebrow.  “You think that’ll stop them from going if they think they’ll come home to another man’s baby?  Oh honey.  All this time and you still don’t get how serious this all is for them.”  She shook her head, moved Smug to the other breast, and said, “You tell Vorgullum that and he’ll be devastated, all right.  And then he’ll order his men to give their mates up permanently.  Including you.  Oh yes,” she said, when Olivia opened her mouth to protest.  “He’s only got so many fliers and he’s taking all  but maybe ten of them.  If he thinks he’s got to worry about finding you pregnant when he comes home, he’ll just take Somurg for his new mate to raise and let you be some other man’s mate.  After all, the whole point is a healthy tribe.  He can’t risk blurring the bloodlines, can he?”

“This isn’t right!”

“So?”

Olivia looked down at her hands.

“Don’t do it,” Amy said quietly.  “You can’t stop him from taking those women and I want to go back to Kurlun when it’s over.  You’ve fought like hell for us all this time, but you have got to learn to pick your battles.  You’re not winning this one.”

Her throat was too tight to speak.  She nodded once.

“Ah Olivia, come on, it’s not so bad.”  Amy reached out and patted her knee with a tiny, troubled frown.  “It’s not bad, it’s just…different.  Look, even after everything you’ve done here—and honey, you’ve done a lot—you can’t expect everything to change.  Women have a definite position in this society.”  She flipped a faint smile that didn’t quite touch her eyes.  “It just happens to be on their backs.”

5

“Are you certain you have everything?”  Vorgullum plucked her backpack from her hands and pawed through it without waiting for an answer.  “Wrappings, soap, food, water,” he muttered.  “Will you be warm enough?”

They had made it all the way to the foot of the shaft leading out of the mountain.  She had been trying to leave for more than two hours now, a process made slightly more complicated by his insisting on rummaging through her gear every five minutes.

“You need a shelter,” he declared.

“I’ll be just fine without one.”  Exasperated, she added, “One day, you said.  One day and the larger share of two nights.  You’re sending me away with enough supplies to start my own tribe!”

“Better than to send you away so that you die of cold,” he countered, hooking the words out of the air even as he spoke them. 

“Is it that cold?” she asked gently.  “Is it?”

He growled, looked into her backpack, then zipped it up and handed it back.  “I’d feel better if I could stay with you.”

“I know,” she said.

The invitation she did not extend was louder than anything else she could have said.  He heard it, sighed, and looked away.  “Can I do nothing more for you?” he asked at last.

Olivia, with superhuman effort, bit back the words,
Yes, you can get us out of here already
.  She strapped on a water skin instead.  The truth was, while she greatly appreciated a lift out to Murgull’s grave, she wanted very much to be alone once she got there.  She did not have any ‘human rites’ to perform the way he’d assumed she did, but she wanted to use this unique opportunity to find some herbs for the birth control potion.  Thurga, Crugunn and Rumm had all three been out gathering what they could, but what grew around the aeries themselves was limited.  Gullan could fly, but a gullan woman actually doing so could only attract suspicion (and after a lifetime spent on the ground, none of them could fly well or for long.  During the move from Hollow Mountain, as distracted as she’d been, she’d noticed that most of the females had to be carried).  She, on the other hand, would be free to forage around Murgull’s grave all day, filling her pack with forbidden herbs with impunity. 

“I’m ready,” she said, and strapped a struggling Somurg into his travel-sling.

“Do you have—” he began, then stopped.  He opened his arms with an air of reluctance, and thawed only slightly when she came into them and bit at the sensitive spot below his throat.  “Do that again,” he said in his best impersonation of a sexy growl, “And you won’t leave this mountain tonight.”

She was tempted to try it again just to see if he meant it, but settled against his chest instead, and after another long minute, he lifted her up and took her out of the mountain.

He’d promised her the larger part of the night, and maybe it would have been if he’d let her go when she first asked, but now it was close to dawn.  The clouds shone silver in the east where the sun would soon rise; for now, the mountains around them were nothing more than black peaks against a sky scarcely lighter.  The air felt heavy, clean and thick with the promise of rain, and it was beautiful to see it, to smell it, and not to be drugged to the gills or running for her life so that she could appreciate it.

“A cold night,” Vorgullum said beside her.

Here we go
, thought Olivia.  “Not so cold.”

“There is still snow in places.”

“In places,” she agreed.  “But it’s melting.”

His jaw clenched.  He stared into the dark and did not reply.

And this was Vorgullum.  He might very well trust her as much as he claimed to, but he had agreed to allow her to go only because he couldn’t argue with the superstitious side of him that made him see her promise to Murgull as something sacred and binding.  No, he would never order her not to go.  He wouldn’t even ask her not to go.  He’d just find every loose thread he could and pick at it, hoping she would eventually get nervous enough to bow out for him.

And she wasn’t going to.  She didn’t know whether or not she really believed Murgull’s spirit was waiting at her grave to see little Somurg (a year ago, she would have known perfectly well that such a thing was impossible, but that was a year before the Great Spirit had ever possessed her to pull Bahgree out of a walking, talking dead woman), but she knew she needed as many birth control herbs as she could possibly find and she couldn’t exactly collect them under Vorgullum’s gaze.  So she waited.

And waited.

And finally, he bent his head and sighed.  “You are such a stubborn woman.”

“I never used to be.  I got that way living with you.”

He opened his arms.  She filled them at once, shifting the travel-sling several times until she found a way to settle it between them, and then put her arms around Vorgullum’s neck.  She looked calmly up into his eyes and waited.

And waited.

Somurg grunted down deep in his sling, sucked noisily on his fist, and quieted.

Vorgullum’s hands came slowly around her waist.  He lifted her and waited some more.

She wrapped her legs around his hips to help distribute her weight and just let the minutes spool out.

“Damn it,” he muttered, and jumped.

Flight was never going to be the amazing, liberating thing that Disney made it out to be.  Olivia tucked her head in close against him so she wouldn’t have to see the world rushing by a billion miles below her with nothing between her and it but Vorgullum’s wings, those wings that the laws of physics demanded could never
ever
support him.  He flexed his claws for her, assurance in the form of ten sharp pricks that he would never let her fall, but she did not relax her iron grip on him until he swept down and came back into solid contact with the Earth.

The flight could not have lasted more than half an hour, and yet in that time the sky had entirely lightened to a smudgy, uneven grey, and although the sun had not quite risen, she could make out her surroundings quite well.  He had brought them down in a clearing of sorts, the last really open place at the base of the mountain before the mammoth forest blanketing this part of the world closed off all sight.  Some of the many rivulets pouring out of the mountain had come together, splashing noisily down the last rocky lengths until they fell into the deep banks of a swiftly-flowing stream. Beyond some early-morning bird chatter, there was no other sign of life.

Somurg, quiet throughout the duration of the flight, let out a piercing howl as soon as his parents separated and the security of their close embrace was lost.  Vorgullum hooked a claw into the travel sling and pulled it open enough to see his son’s angry face.  His own remained impassive.